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January 17, 2013

(+++) HABIT FORMING

Making Habits, Breaking Habits:
Why We Do Things, Why We Don’t, and How to Make Any Change Stick. By Jeremy
Dean. Da Capo. $26.

Habits are necessary.
Going through everyday life largely on autopilot makes it possible for us to
handle routine matters – and many of the elements of everyday life are routine – without a tremendous
amount of thought or angst. Psychologist Jeremy Dean does not give this
particular extreme example, but it is worth thinking about: what if you had to
contemplate every step you were about to take, thinking about which muscles you
needed to use and how you needed to get them to work together to move you
forward? You would never go anywhere. The scenario is absurd, of course,
because once people learn to walk, they just do it. Walking is not exactly a habit, but considering this extreme
example sheds light on Dean’s views about how habits operate and what functions
they fulfill.

There is nothing bad
about habits, but there are bad habits – ones we would like to break. Smoking,
eating unhealthful food, failing to exercise, and a host of other behaviors to
which we are habituated may be ones that we know are bad for us or that we
simply want to change for reasons of our own. But changing habits is hard – and
Making Habits, Breaking Habits is
intended to show why. Dean explains that habits generally form unconsciously,
and that this is a good thing – he may not use the “walking” example, but he
does point out that we do not necessarily want to think deeply about looking
both ways before crossing a street.Dean
says that about one-third of our waking hours are ruled by habit – probably a
conservative estimate for at least some people. And because habits do fulfill
useful functions, changing them is difficult – harder, in fact, than creating
new, better ones.

The analyses in books
of this type generally make a great deal of sense, and Dean’s certainly
do.(He runs a Web site called Psyblog,
intended to interpret complex research in simple terms so people can make use
of it.) Dean argues convincingly that habits are essentially automatic pilots,
taking us through elements of everyday life that we must negotiate regularly
and on which we need not expend too much mental energy because we are
habituated to handle them.So far, so
good; but for this very reason, because habits do make things easier, it can be
very difficult to change them.

The prescriptive part
of self-help books is where many of them fall down. Dean’s is better than most.
He explains many ways to create new, positive habits: start with a small
behavioral change rather than trying a major one; break a bigger change (such
as healthful eating) down into small parts; build on existing positive or
neutral habits to add new ones – for instance, if after work you wash up and
change clothes, add “jog for 15 minutes” to the routine, so you are expanding
it instead of trying to create something altogether new; create or join a
support group; repeat the new habit as often as possible, until it becomes
ingrained and automatic (like other habits); avoid being too hard on yourself
if this process proves difficult – negative self-talk will only make it harder.

But if the key to
creating new habits is attention and repetition, the key to breaking unwanted
ones is something else – and here Dean is less helpful. He admits that breaking
bad habits is harder than creating new ones (which makes sense: our minds, as
Dean shows, are hard-wired to create habits, not to dismantle them).But his idea of breaking a bad habit by not inhibiting it – thinking of it as a
kind of flow that will continue no matter what, allowing you to substitute
something else but not to stop the flow altogether – is psychologically and
theoretically sound but not terribly helpful in practice.In addition, some of the research examples
that Dean cites in discussing habits are interesting in themselves but not particularly
useful for people trying to change their forms of habituation. For example, he
cites a study on the roots of creativity in which one group thought of love,
one thought of sex, and one (the control group) thought of neither. Those who
thought about love did best on creative-thinking problems; those who thought
about sex did best on analytical ones. Dean points out that the experiment was
really about the balance between abstract and concrete thought, and then gets
into a discussion of how we think about time, and it is all quite interesting –
but not readily applicable to the underlying theme of the book, at least from a
self-help perspective.

Actually, the book
reads like one in which Dean primarily shares his own fascination with a
variety of research projects of various kinds, pausing occasionally to relate
this study or that back to the whole issue of forming and changing habits.And there is nothing wrong with being a bit
discursive, especially when the underlying material is as interesting as much
of it is here. But readers looking for somewhat more-focused and more-pointed
answers to their questions about managing and changing their own habits may
find Making Habits, Breaking Habits a
bit less than habit-forming.